Oft-Used Examples of Poor Grammar that Irritate You.

'arks' and 'arksed'

No it's not, you congenital mooncalf.

He went ahead and hired him anyway and now I'm more than a little bit concerned.

"ON accident" (as opposed to "BY accident")

recently, "ValentiMes Day"

hey i'm from Staten Island, i can fill up a book - what was that old song by Wrathchild America - "Surrounded by Idiots?"

the misuse of their/they're/there and its/it's

i do, however, have a major problem with "quarter of" instead of "quarter to" when speaking of the time. "quarter of" simply doesn't make sense.

B-b-but "Think different" the different is as in "Think big" which wouldn't be "Think bigly" but like, "Yo, think of us as different."

For my part, tho I'm scholarly-like and know the difference, I still say "real" and not "really," as in, "that's real nice." I don't care though.

Growing up in a place where the dialect / accent is lazy and ignorant sounding has its price. I work up one morning when I was 13 and decided I didn't wanna speak with a Staten Island accent anymore (it's the worst accent of all time) and adopted that popular Planet Nowhere accent I have now. I've never slipped, ever. BUT...since I grew up hearing people speak this certain way, I misheard certain words words growing up. So in college when I told my best friend I had a "cankus sore" (because Staten Island folk say "canka so-ah") she teased me mercileesly for years. "cank-uhh??," she cried, "Cank-uhh?? AHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA!!!"

(see? i like the written "more prettier" but the spoken one would bug me, partly just coz it flows wrong -- "partly just coz" isn't quite correct grammar either, i think. [haha the i think postfix ain't neither (i'll stop now)]

Back to geekery: its like ppl. hardcoding/macroing new language constructs like for example "if this expression does not evaluate to null execute the following codeblock with the value of the expression given the name passed" which i was hurtin' for while coding today. Lisp programmers do this bunches.

Main Entry: com·prise
Pronunciation: k&m-'prIz
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): com·prised; com·pris·ing
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French compris, past participle of comprendre, from Latin comprehendere
Date: 15th century
1 : to include especially within a particular scope [civilization as Lenin used the term would then certainly have comprised the changes that are now associated in our minds with "developed" rather than "developing" states —Times Literary Supplement]
2 : to be made up of [a vast installation, comprising fifty buildings —Jane Jacobs]
3 : COMPOSE, CONSTITUTE [a misconception as to what comprises a literary generation —William Styron] [about 8 percent of our military forces are comprised of women —Jimmy Carter]
usage Although it has been in use since the late 18th century, sense 3 is still attacked as wrong. Why it has been singled out is not clear, but until comparatively recent times it was found chiefly in scientific or technical writing rather than belles lettres. Our current evidence shows a slight shift in usage: sense 3 is somewhat more frequent in recent literary use than the earlier senses. You should be aware, however, that if you use sense 3 you may be subject to criticism for doing so, and you may want to choose a safer synonym such as compose or make up.

© 2001 by Merriam-Webster, Incorporated
Merriam-Webster Privacy Policy

When people use 'less' where they should use 'fewer' and vice versa. This one is a pet hate of my mum's (anal listmaking statistician) and I've osmosed it. There was a massive poster on the wall at Russell Square tube station advertising Oyster cards, in which a plucky young executive was informed that he could carry 'less coins' around with him. What, are pound coins going to be reduced in size or something?

When people say they're 'itching' themselves. Nooooooooooo! You have an itch which you can then scratch. Not really an issue lately, but all my friends at school used this (is it a Kentish thing?) and it would drive me up the wall and then they'd call me pedantic. Which is fair enough, I suppose.

What is the world coming to?

(Or, To what is the world coming? maybe...)

Anyway, you are all fascists.

Less sugar
Fewer sugar cubes

it's, by the way

it's you're, by the way

QED

Not really: dictionaries have always included slang and jargon for the purpose of convenience. It's fallacious to presume this is endorsement. Most recent dictionaries (off- and on- line alike) include scads of non-standard words, slurs, colloquialisms, what-have-yous, c.f. the inarguably incorrect 'irregardless' or the slangy 'nigga.'

Language changes. Yes, it's better not to let it be a free for all. Children should be told that certain things are wrong. But equally, language has never been static and never will be. If there's no good reason for objecting to a common usage or spelling other than that the word wasn't always spelt that way, then that's where it's advisable to start thinking about going with the flow, rather than making pointless attempts to ossify something that will always resist ossification.

I object to errors of language when they cloud understanding, as with non-standard spellings, poor punctuation, poor sentence construction, or the confusion of two words with usefully distinct meanings. As I said above, I don't think the use of 'alright' does any of those things.

I'm in a funny place, where I have a fairly good understanding of 'the common errors', and know that there are people like you who will think less of me if I make them, even though I know that language scholars are happy to point out that a certain rule is actually the result of some stuffy 18th century grammarian's attempt to make English more like their beloved Latin, or whatever. So I still tend to stick to all those rules, just to show that I know them. It's like the intellectual equivalent of a secondary sexual characteristic. I'm not glad that I do that, though. It turns language into a kind of snobbery system, where people are classed as according to whether they know some arbitrary rule, by people who try to feel better about themselves by sneering at some and slapping others on the back for being in the know.

So I do tend to spell 'all right' as two words, but kind of wish I didn't. I am pretty bold these days about splitting infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions, though.

OTM, which is why I get kind of irritated by those who get irritated by minor grammatical issues.

xpost

What sends me running screaming from the room, you barely notice, and vice versa. What may or may not be 'correct' (according to some 'authority' or other) is a red herring we may sometimes usefully bring in to give our prejudices a basis. But at base my fingernails-down-the-blackboard reaction to 'could of' or 'should of' (see upthread) comes from my nervous system, not my intellect.

oops has nailed it.

spelled.

That's an over-the-top argument - if complete bastardization (shorthanding, sloppiness) of language were the natural progression of things, every generation's style would seem like Finnegan's Wake on acid to the previous ones. Language evolves in a Darwinian sense - when necessary, when offering some modification or new and apropos speciation. Verbal canon's a social contract and the necessity of agreeing on a certain core grammar / lexicon is - especially because of electronic fracturing - more important than ever.

It would have been better if grammar had been spelt 'grammer' in the title.

Finnegans Wake

spelled.

A 'bastard word' it may be on your earth, but over here on ours most folk don't seem to give a toss. Which may in time, of course, destroy our ozone layer and seal the doom of our civilisation. Only time will tell.

whoa whoa whoa... this is wrong. languages are grouped in families but the process by which they became differentiated is not an evolutionary one. that's a really bad analogy. all modern languages have had equal fitness in an evolutionary sense since modern languages first appeared (50k-500k years ago, depending on what you believe). so with the exception of pidgins, all languages, including the same language at different points in time, have equal fitness. they don't evolve, they just change. english didn't get less synthetic and more analytic because analytic languages are more versatile than synthetic ones. it just changed.

along these lines, current words should not be called bastardizations of older words. that implies some kind of de-evolution of language as time progresses and that's not what is happening either. we needn't worry about english changing too rapidly. widespread literacy is a very effective brake on language change and has more of an impact than every style guide ever published.

I'm not sure: he did invent something like a third of all the words he used, apparently. (Individual words, not total. But still, can this be right?)

widespread literacy is a very effective brake on language change

This is certainly true. The differences between Chaucer's and Shakespeare's English is huge, but because of printing the difference between Shakespeare's and today's is less so. There was another century after Chaucer of rapid change, then it stabilised a bit before Shakespeare who went and changed vocabulary massively.

spelled.

-- jed_ (colin_o_har...), July 27th, 2004. (later)

I was under the impression that both 'spelt' and 'spelled' were acceptable here...

Re: split infinitives. To me, '"To boldly go where no man has gone before" carries a slightly different meaning to "To go boldly where no man has gone before".

The latter suggests that 'boldly' is qualifying the going. (In what manner is he going? He's going boldly). Whereas in the former, the very act of going sounds bold in itself.

It totally decimates me.

I kind of believe him.

well, not exactly. all that really gave us was people saying ye as an old-timey version of the. in middle english thou and thee were (along with other variants) the subject and object forms of the second-person singular pronoun. ye and you were the subject and object forms of the second-person plural pronoun, but they were also used as polite singular forms. eventually thou and thee faded away and we were left with just ye and you with no singular-plural distinction in second-person pronouns. around the same time you became the heavily favored of the two. ye is still around but you can't really employ it formally as a pronoun unless you are at a pirate conference.

these days of course we have a few options for making that singular-plural distinction in second-person pronouns. i say y'all in all but the most formal situations, and other dialects have other ways of showing the plural.

I'm not so keen on 'youse'.

"ALUMNI" IS NOT A SINGULAR NOUN.

THANKS YOU MAY GO BACK TO YOUR SNACKS AND WANKING.

Roffle